


sic transit gloria mundi

by therm0dynamics



Series: the city of angels [3]
Category: True Detective
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-11
Updated: 2015-08-11
Packaged: 2018-04-14 03:20:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4548321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/therm0dynamics/pseuds/therm0dynamics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So actually, as far as he can tell, it’s still California. </p><p>(or, the beginning after the end)</p>
            </blockquote>





	sic transit gloria mundi

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [【翻译】sic transit gloria mundi辞世](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10350411) by [liangdeyu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/liangdeyu/pseuds/liangdeyu)



> now [translated into chinese](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10350411) by [liangdeyu](http://archiveofourown.org/users/liangdeyu/)!
> 
> wrote this in like an hour after i watched the finale because while yes, i acknowledge what happened indeed has happened and was a decently solid narrative choice, i refuse to be happy about it. on the bright side, this is like the shortest thing i’ve written so far?? title is incredibly cheesy i'm sorry. 
> 
> spoilers for the finale!!

He doesn’t know how much time passes. Day and a night, maybe. A week or two. Months, years. Whatever. It’s hard to tell when you’re drifting through endless plains of black nothingness. It’s even harder to care. After the vicissitudes of life, the stagnancy of oblivion feels so - _consolatory_.

So the last thing he expects is to wake up, but he does. He feels the dirt first, hardscrabble grit pressing into his body. Then he opens his eyes and there it is, white sun like burning magnesium blazing down on him.

 _The fuck did I end up in Heaven_ , he thinks for a ridiculous moment. Because while he doesn’t exactly remember _who_ he is and the details of _how_ and _why_ he’s here are even hazier, he knows one thing for certain - he’s dead. He’d died. Whatever. Time is so utterly irrelevant now.

Then a cutting gust of dry wind chafes at his exposed skin, bringing with it the smell of chaparral and smog. Heaven’s supposed to smell like ambrosia and incense and whatever the fuck. So actually, as far as he can tell, it’s still California.

Well. Hell it is.

He flexes his fingers, then tenses his wrists, elbows, shoulders, and with a tremendous effort, heaves himself off the ground and onto his forearms. It’s surprisingly painless. He looks down, notes the pool of red staining the sand. His shirt’s stiff with blood, but when he presses a hand cautiously to his side, it comes away clean. Everything seems okay.

The next breeze carries with it something else.

Music.

He looks up. Not five hundred yards in the distance straight ahead is a squat rectangular shack. A tiny ramshackle building. But a hauntingly familiar sight.

It takes him another small eternity to stand and re-learn how to walk, but he manages.

\-- 

The interior of the shack is at least tenfold larger than it looks the outside, but spatiality, like temporality, had become inconsequential to him about an infinity and a half ago.

It’s dark inside and blessedly cool. Like stepping into a different world entirely. On stage in the front of the room, a sleepy-eyed singer plucks at her guitar and intones what could be a hymn or could be a dirge in her ghostly drone.

He’s caught for some time trying decipher her words, but then something draws his eye into a booth in the corner of the room. And he looks over and there sits a stocky guy about his age wearing a green button-down shirt and a grey whipcord jacket - both drenched with blood - long brown hair tied back, guileless dark eyes that are somehow _so fucking familiar_ -

“Ray?” he asks. God knows where he’d pulled that name from, but he knows he’s right because Ray startles and whips his head around, his eyes widening -

“What the hell - Frank?” Ray says, incredulity written all over his face.

Frank. That’s his name. Frank Semyon.

“Shit,” Frank breathes. He squeezes his eyes shut as everything comes back to him at once in a wave of light and sound. The heist in the mountains, the abduction, the pathetic excuse for a final showdown. The boat to Venezuela. The lady cop, Ani. Ray. _Jordan_. All the memories frighteningly real and immediate like nothing else in this place has been so far.

“Whoa, whoa, alright, easy - yeah, it’s hard when you first - you’re okay, c’mere.” Ray’s suddenly materialized at his side and slipped a steadying arm over his shoulders to guide him down to the seat.

“What the _fuck_ , Ray?” Frank all but yells when the audio-visual hallucinations settle down. Then he looks around the bar and lowers his voice, because although the workings of time and space are apparently dispensable concepts, his sense of etiquette has stayed with him. “How are you here? How’d you end up in the desert too?”

“Desert? No, I walked through the woods to get here. They put a transponder on my car, Frank. Burris - that - that _fucker_ was gonna get Ani,” Ray grits out, unconsciously rubbing at his chest where the bloodstains bloom. And Frank knows he still feels it, because he himself can still sense the lingering sting of a cold knife shoved between his ribs.

“Well, I hope you made them work for it.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I lead ‘em on a nice stroll through the redwoods. I took a few of ‘em down, but they outnumbered me in the end. Blaze of glory and all that bullshit. Sounded better in the movies.”

So Ray had faced his death straight-on. Painless and clean. Frank feels a strange sense of relief at that.

“What happened to you?” Ray asks.

“Those fucking Mexicans,” Frank says ruefully. “Ambushed me. Drove me into the desert. I paid ‘em off with a cool mil, and they were gonna take it, but - ”

“You did something muleheaded and _honorable_ and it fucked you over, didn’t it?”

“Yeah. Well. One of them wanted my suit on top of all that cash. Insult to injury, right. I didn’t feel particularly inclined to give it up, so they shivved me. Guess I knew in the back of my mind I was dead anyway, you know? Might as well die with some dignity.”

“Fucking incredible,” Ray says with a bitter half-grin. And suddenly he sticks out his hand across the table and lays it on Frank’s forehead like some strange benediction, then slowly moves down over his face like a blind man feeling for sight. He skates his fingers lightly across Frank’s wind-chapped lips and then pulls away, rubbing the desert grit from his hands.

“Sorry,” he mutters. “Had to check. I’ve been here - dunno how long. You’re the first real thing I’ve seen. Or at least, the first thing I choose to believe is real.”

Frank swallows the unexpected lump in his throat and reaches over and tugs Ray’s hair loose, runs his hands through it to shake out the loose pine needles and forest dirt. Then tucks it back behind his ears, grabs him gently by the chin, and scans his face over intently. His skin is warm, healthy-looking like it’d never really been in life. He’s still got that expressive, almost childish gaze that Frank can _still_ read like a fucking book.

He drops his hand. It’s Ray. He’s alive. That’s good enough.

“So what is this, the afterlife?” Frank gestures around. “Never imagined Hell would look like the Black Rose, though I guess that makes sense.”

“You think we’re in Hell?”

“ _You_ think we’ve somehow attained something greater?” 

“There _is_ a grey area, you know,” Ray says with that pissy expression that he’s always had in life, in the _before_ \- and it’s so idiosyncratic and familiar that Frank has to laugh. “The in-between place. That’s where I imagine all of this - ” he gestures at himself and then at Frank “- balances out.”

“Called _Purgatory_ , Raymond. Dante’s _Inferno_? Read a book.”

“Oh, ‘scuse me, Professor.”

They fall companionably silent for a bit, and Frank idly realizes that although he’d spent however long baking in the desert, he doesn’t feel hungry or thirsty at all. But suddenly there’s a glass of whiskey, neat, in his hand. He stares at it and then watches Ray take a pull from a cold beer that Frank could swear on, well, his own grave, wasn’t there before.

“So,” Frank says, trying to piece it all together. “You came here from the forest. I walked in from the desert. Where do you suppose we would be if we went out that door?” 

He points to the two incongruous metal doors set in the wall directly across from the stage where he’d entered. An _EXIT_ sign hangs above it, glowing steady red in the grungy yellow lighting of the bar.

“Dunno,” Ray says, puzzled.

“You been _reposing_ here this whole time and you didn’t think to check?”

“No,” Ray says, turning that honest stare on him. “No, I guess I was waiting.”

Frank’s breath catches as he realizes. Ray’s with him like he always was, and he’s with Ray like he always was. Before Ani, before Jordan, before all this shit with Caspere got them killed, this is how it was. And this is how it’s gonna be till -

Well, it doesn’t even matter. He can live with this for as long as it'll last.

“Wait’s over. Or are we gonna sit here forever?”

“Jesus Christ. Can’t I enjoy a bit of _Purgatory_ in peace?" 

“Hey, keep moving, live forever, right?” Frank says, and stands.

He doesn’t have to look back to know Ray’s right behind him. And then they’re across the room, the melancholy singer humming her last refrain, the final song of the night, last call at the bar. And then they’re pushing the double doors open together and stepping out into a place that’s not desert and not woodland. Somewhere new and infinitely stranger.

 

**Author's Note:**

> fun fact: speculating about the afterlife is my JAM. i’m like 10% tempted to turn this into an actual thing with plot and stuff bc i feel like i’m not done with these two but i d k if there’s any interest in that both from my end and a readerly perspective. apologies for like NOT editing this whatsoever, if there’s anything wrong please let me know! hope you enjoyed, let me know what you think :)


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